RAÍCES
MAGDALENA PAZ
“Where do your roots lie?”
It’s a question asked in many languages, but for the artist, its weight deepens in Spanish. Raíces, (roots) are not only origins, but the quiet, trembling place where belonging, identity, and memory intertwine.
“I don’t know if I really feel like I belong anywhere,” the artist admits early in our conversation, “but I feel the most comfortable here.” Here is Berlin: a city of endless arrivals, departures, reinventions. This tension, between comfort and belonging, between the warmth of one place and the practical stability of another, forms the heart of Raíces, her newest body of work. In this body of work, the artist journeys through the shifting terrains of her own lived experience: continents crossed, languages learned and half-lost, and the subtle transformations triggered by each new place.
This exhibition marks a turning point in the artist’s practice. Once rooted in depictions of rest, recovery, and the body healing after years of competitive sport, her work now opens toward metaphor, abstraction, and the quiet symbolism of the natural world. The first sparks came while interpreting a composer’s travel postcards, reflections on how places transform us as we transform them. Plants, bodies of water, and cyclical growth entered her visual vocabulary then, and now return with deeper resonance. In Raíces, plants become stand-ins for the self: delicate, hybrid bodies with fragile stems and no visible roots; forms suspended between blooming and uprooting. Some works explore belonging through the gut, a space of instinct, reaction, and unease, while others look toward the horizon where imagined futures take shape. Belonging, here, is not an answer but a landscape of questions.
They Might Very Well Transform Each Other, 2025, Acrylic, dye, pastel on unstretched canvas, 215 x 257 cm
€ 7900
“In Spanish, when you ask where someone belongs, you ask about their raíces,” she explains. “It felt natural to explore that metaphor.”
Holding and Transforming, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
€ 540
The paintings move between abstraction and figuration, between atmospheric colour-fields and bodies caught in intimate, introspective moments. Figures stretch, lounge, or simply exist within fields of sunrise pinks, muted blues, and quiet greens: palettes shaped, unconsciously, by time spent in sunlit Portugal and the rhythm of daily morning runs.
Naked but Not, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 90 cm
€ 2750
Some works in Raíces draw directly from embodied experience. Naked, but Not, for instance, began as a quiet scene of repose, a woman in a bathtub, before revealing a deeper psychological charge. As she painted, a mask emerged, then a glove. These symbols shifted the work’s meaning: “A bathroom is where you should let your guard down,” she notes, “and yet there’s still a mask. Still protection.” This resonated with her reflections on identity across languages and cultures: “I don’t really know if anyone can see who I am fully. A part of me never comes through in every language or every place.”
Gut Feeling, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 150 cm
€ 4400
Other works lean further into abstraction, such as the tangled rootforms in Gut Feeling. The work depicts long-stemmed flowers anchored nowhere, forms caught between blooming and drifting. When a friend questioned their lack of roots, she responded: “Exactly. They’re just stuck there. They don’t belong; they’re only staying because they think they should.”
Raíces, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 105 x 120 cm
€ 3000
Though the characters in these paintings rarely show facial expression, their bodies speak in gestures charged with deliberateness. Years of training, first in athletics, then in fashion design and figure drawing have made the artist acutely aware of balance, weight, and the center of gravity. In Raíces, the body is both anchor and metaphor: a physical presence negotiating the shifting terrain of identity.
Inside Universe, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 cm
€ 470
Colour, once a struggle the artist approached with near-athletic discipline has become the driving force of these works. Each canvas evolves through trial, error, and constant erasure: layers of forgotten tones shimmering beneath the final surface. “The painting reveals itself if I’m willing to listen,” she often says. And it is through this attentive, intuitive process that meaning emerges, not planned, but recognized.
Oh So Simple, 2025, Edition: 6 + 2 AP (each hand-intervened, with slight variations) Relief print with colored pencil and paper collage on wooden board, signed and numbered on the reverse, 30 x 42 cm.
€ 250
Raíces asks not where we come from, but how we grow, transform, and persist in the in-between. It is an exhibition about belonging that resists easy conclusions, offering instead the poetic possibility of rooting and uprooting, of being shaped by places and shaping them in return, of discovering the self anew through the act of looking.
Ultimately, these works form a visual diary, a record of questioning rather than resolution. They invite viewers to enter that same state of wonder: to trace the lines, colors, and forms until personal meanings appear. As the artist reflects, her role is simply “to recognize the moment the painting completes its own thought, and to give it a name.” What the viewer finds in it, what story they read, what emotion they encounter, is the other half of the work.
For detailed information and purchase enquiries, click here.
All prices are excl. VAT & shipping.